Keiko's Decision
by Technomad
Summary: An AU for chapters 101 and 102 of the manga. What if Nakata's gun hadn't been in reach of Keiko just at the wrong time?


Keiko's Decision

by Technomad

A _Battle Royale_ manga AU fanfic

(This is an AU for chapters 101 and 102 of the manga)

The roar of Shogo Kawada's .45 automatic nearly deafened Keiko, even though she had been hearing shooting ever since she had been released into the Program. The gunshot's report echoed off the buildings surrounding her.

Behind her, Nakata, the boy who'd been holding her hostage to stay Shogo's hand, convulsed. Involuntarily, he threw the revolver he'd been pressing into Keiko's forehead; it landed a good four meters away as he slumped and she collapsed. The terror she'd felt for the last forty-five hours caught up to her all at once, and all she could do was stare into space.

"No safety on a revolver, Nakata, old chum," drawled Shogo past the cigarette he held clenched in his teeth. "_You_, out of all of them..._you_ I don't _regret_!" With that, a lot of the energy seemed to seep out of him, and he collapsed into a sitting position. He wiped sweat and blood from his forehead.

"Sorry about all that," Shogo said. "Guess I should have tried out for the drama club while I could, huh?"" Keiko stared at him, unable to believe the change in her longtime boyfriend. From an icy killer, who'd told her that she'd become expendable, he had turned back into the guy she loved. Her mouth opened and shut, but no words came out. Shogo grinned wearily. "Yeah...good to see you too, Keiko."

Finally, Keiko got her voice under enough control to be able to speak. "Th-that's thirteen? Was that part true..._is_ he number thirteen?" Her voice rose. "Shogo...what have you _done_?"

Shogo gave her the look she'd seen so often from him, although never like now, with that horrible cut around one of his eyes leaking blood all over his face. "What I had to do…no more, no less." He quirked up one eyebrow. "Oh...and F.Y.I? I saved your life, so you're welcome!"

"Oh." Involuntary reflex took over, the residue of a Japanese upbringing. "Thank you, Shogo." Then it hit her…what he had said had been nothing but the truth! She began to shake uncontrollably, tears leaking from her eyes.

"What…what do you plan now?" She could hardly recognize her own voice.

"What do I plan?" Shogo gave her his quizzical look, the look that had first determined her to have him. "All I'm asking for is some time with you. Before you win this thing. Congratulations, victor!"

"_Win_?"

Shogo held up an odd device. On a screen, she could see a grid corresponding to the map of the area where their Program had been held, with three bright spots on it. Two of them were very close together, while the third was a little way away, from what she could see.

"_This_ is a collar detector. I took it off of Yamashiro after I shot my way out of an ambush he'd set up for me. There's just one more person out here. Just one more…and us two. I'll take out the third one, and then I just want twenty hours. After that…boom!" He pointed his finger at his own forehead, his face twisting in a bitter grin. "Then I take myself out, and you win. No rule at all against doing yourself in, in the Program."

Keiko stared at the boy she'd loved since they were ten-year-olds, her eyes swimming with tears and her heart feeling as though it was being torn out by the roots. She thought, frantically trying to come up with an alternate scenario, and failing. Then she was crying, so hard that she couldn't even see Shogo in front of her any more.

People who only knew Shogo from school would never have believed it, but Shogo had a tender side, the side of him he let only her ever see. He was holding her, soothing her, murmuring wordlessly. She clung to him convulsively, shaking, until she was back under some sort of control. She freed one hand to grab her ratty handkerchief, already stiff with dried tears, and wipe her face. She rubbed her eyes, and squeezed them shut to clear her vision. Then she saw clearly what was behind Shogo, and she stiffened in his embrace.

Emiko Tanaka, one of their classmates, was approaching very quietly from behind Shogo. She had clearly been through the mill nearly as badly as Shogo had. She had cuts all over her face, her shirt had been torn open, exposing her chest and bra, and her eyes held no sanity. She was staggering, blood on her thighs, her face twisted in an insane grin. But she was holding a Beretta automatic pistol, and as she came closer, she began to bring it up.

Keiko stiffened in Shogo's arms. _Where the __hell__ was Nakata's damned revolver_? Then she remembered; in his last death spasm, Nakata had thrown it, and it was out of reach. As Emiko began to raise her pistol in a trembling hand, Keiko hissed: "Shogo…_behind you_! It's Tanaka!"

For all his weariness, Shogo still had energy left; he whirled, his eyes going wide with fear and rage to see a girl he'd discounted just about to take him down. "Fucking _bitch_!" he snarled, his hand darting for his waistband where his Government Model .45 rode.

Emiko Tanaka giggled insanely. "Shoot you…shoot the sweethearts…two for one…win the game!" She took aim, her muzzle wobbling about.

Shogo and Emiko fired simultaneously; their pistols' reports blended into a single roar, making Keiko's ears ring. Emiko's bullet _spang_ed off the wall behind her. She felt chips of brick and brick dust against her skin, and ducked involuntarily.

Shogo's aim was better, or possibly he was just luckier. His .45 drilled through the center of Emiko's chest, knocking her back off her feet. She landed in an undignified sprawl, her legs akimbo and her eyes rolled back up in her head. Beside him, the third light on the collar detector blinked out, leaving only two. Only Shogo and Keiko were left.

"Like I was saying," Shogo said, his voice a ragged parody of his usual calm, rather sardonic tones, "now that I've taken out the last one other than us, all I want is twenty hours with you, before I kill myself and let you win."

At that statement, a wave of rebellion rose up in Keiko. "Oh? And what about what _I_ want?" Shogo's eyes went wide. "Didn't you factor in the fact that I have a mind and a viewpoint of my own when you came up with this brilliant plan?"

"Keiko!"

"Look, Shogo, I know what you're trying to do. It's very sweet, and very male, of you, to offer to just sacrifice yourself. But how do you think _I'll_ feel after you've done it?"

"I'd never be able to forgive myself if you died!"

"And do you think _I_ could forgive _myself_ if I just _let_ you _kill yourself_?" By now, they were standing nose-to-nose, arguing just as they had done a thousand times before in Kobe. The sheer incongruity of it hit them both at once, and they began to laugh the sort of laugh that is a substitute for tears.

"Oh, merciful Buddha," Keiko finally gasped, "look at us! Even now, we're bickering!"

"As we began, so shall we end," Shogo intoned. It was true…their early friendship had been marked by some spectacular differences of opinion, and Keiko had always had a hard time accepting his harder-edged view of life and reality. They loved each other dearly, but they argued a lot. Down deep, Keiko enjoyed it, and found that defending her beliefs against Shogo's attacks sharpened her mind. She had even been able to change his mind sometimes, and counted those moments among her favorite triumphs.

Casting around for ideas, Keiko looked around them, and her eye fell on Nakata's fallen revolver. Inspiration struck. "Look, Shogo, I don't think you want me to go on all crippled up by guilt any more than I want you to. But if we left it up to blind chance, it'd not be either of our faults, now would it?"

Shogo stared at her, his expression saying eloquently that he thought that his girlfriend had finally gone plumb loco. "What the hell are you saying? Are you saying we flip a coin?"

"No." Disengaging herself from his arms, Keiko walked over to the revolver and picked it up, holding it in such a way that Shogo's hyper-tense reflexes wouldn't see it as pointed at him and take him over. "We have a revolver, and it's got cartridges in the cylinder. I saw, when Nakata caught me." She held the revolver up, miming spinning the cylinder. "Ever do any gambling, Shogo?"

Shogo's eyes went very wide, then he saw what she was driving at. He nodded slowly.

And so it went. For the next twenty hours, they sat together, talking quietly about the past, since they had no future worth contemplating. In the old days, Shogo had talked about how he hoped to go to medical school, and make his father proud of him, while Keiko had spoken of her ambitions to go into the government and maybe make their country a better place to live, or else join Shogo in med school and later run a joint practice. The Program had never entered their conversations, even though they had known that it was out there somewhere.

Like everybody else their age, they had known that the Program was a bad thing that could happen, but they had gone on as though it was something that could only happen to someone else. Even though they had known that it was a possibility, the odds were high that the Angel of Death would pass them by. But the Angel of Death had laid his hand on their shoulders, and they had been marked for the slaughter as surely as animals at the butcher's.

The day wore on, and gradually, they calmed down. At the regular intervals, the hateful, mocking voice over the loudspeaker announced new forbidden zones, but since they weren't moving around and none of the zones were the one they were in, that was of no importance. The announcer's hateful voice kept taunting them, daring them to go on, to finish the game, to the point where Shogo sprang to his feet once and shouted back: "Fuck you, fuck the Program and fuck everybody that ever had anything to do with it! _Rot in hell_, you murderous, sadistic _shits_!"

"Easy there, love," Keiko drawled. They had found a stash of beer left behind by the previous inhabitants of the district that had been taken over, and neither of them was feeling any pain. "He can't hear you. And if curses could hurt them, they'd be smoking piles of ash long since, don't you think?"

Shogo nodded, sitting down again beside Keiko and popping open the can of beer she handed him. He raised in a toast. "To our classmates."

Keiko raised her can as well. "To our classmates." They both drank deeply. Keiko went on, in a solemn voice: "May they someday be able to forgive us."

Finally, at the beginning of the nineteenth hour since Emiko Tanaka's death, they put the plan into operation. Ceremoniously, they brought out Nakata's revolver, and emptied it of all but one cartridge. Then they snapped it shut.

"Before we begin…" Keiko whispered huskily.

Shogo knew what that tone meant. He laid the revolver down on the pavement and took Keiko into his arms, her lips and tongue seeking his greedily since they were only fifteen and one of them was about to die and there was no more time for this. They had talked about making love earlier, but both of them were too drained, and they didn't know where the cameras were. They didn't either of them fancy having their last act of love becoming a highlight of a Program DVD, to be drooled over by sick perverts everywhere.

When they finally were able to break off their kiss, the revolver was taken up, its cylinder spun, and the muzzle carefully pressed to a temple. A squeeze of the trigger produced a loud CLICK.

The revolver was then handed over, its cylinder spun again, pressed to a temple, and the trigger squeezed yet again, producing another CLICK.

Back and forth the revolver went. CLICK. CLICK. CLICK.

Then, finally, an ear-shattering roar.

THE END


End file.
